


the blood-dimmed tide

by bloodbright



Series: Dishonored works [4]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, High Chaos (Dishonored), High Chaos Corvo Attano, Rat Plague | The Doom of Pandyssia, The Void
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-22 19:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13770717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodbright/pseuds/bloodbright
Summary: There are inhabited islands along the Pandyssian coast, set among the whirlpools and currents and treacherous reefs waiting to tear open the belly of unwary ships.The doom of Pandyssia has come to the city.





	the blood-dimmed tide

There are inhabited islands along the Pandyssian coast, set among the whirlpools and currents and treacherous reefs waiting to tear open the belly of unwary ships. The merchant, brave or foolhardy, who survives that dangerous passage buys with his daring the opportunity to offer trade for strange things—black stones that shine like glass and give off their own warmth, coral polished until it gleams with all the colors of fire, as if something moves just below the surface, spices that set afire not only the palate but the intellect—if the islanders deign to take the clockwork toys and cloth goods he has to offer; sometimes they do not.

But of a certainty they will not assent to guide expeditions into the interior of the continent. They will not speak of it. They build their dwellings only on the western side of their islands, and will not fish in the east no matter how rich the shoals.

They will not advise upon the best place to land on the long rocky coast. They will not discuss currents or hazards to the east. They will not so much as look upon the hard-won maps of the interior, upon which a few features have been painstakingly drawn between gaping blank spots.

The renowned explorer Granville Brice had first made his fortune whaling and then used his leisure to become a favorite of the empress—he was still handsome after the loss of an eye in his second expedition, of which nine returned of the fifty-four who set out. He lost his ship on his third. He survived it in a lifeboat with a bare handful of sailors, and in it they drifted ten days before making landfall on the northernmost of the islands, where there were known to be friendly inhabitants.

This much Brice wrote in his journal; that battered volume, preserved in a metal box, returned to Dunwall several years later on the ship of a merchant who, when he had landed on the island, to his dismay found it entirely deserted: the grass houses reduced to ash and scattered by the wind, and a little way down the beach, the charred ribs of the lifeboat still cradling half a dozen skeletons, one of which still bore on its finger the signet of Brice’s family.

The merchant, hoping to salvage something from the water voyage, brought the ring and the journal to court and was richly rewarded for it. Jessamine, with the private support of her much-trusted spymaster, commanded that Brice’s papers be preserved at the Academy and a chair endowed in his honor. Corvo stood silently behind her at the dedication ceremony.

#

#

The Outsider, with his pointed teeth and black pits for eyes, first came to Corvo as he lay in his narrow bed in the attic at the Hound Pits. At first Corvo thought he was going mad. 

Now he no longer wonders. He cuts a bloody swathe through the streets of Dunwall, and sometimes between one step and the next the thin veil of the world cracks open and he sees into the Void: and the starless abyss above, the bottomless abyss below.

(And when he translocates: where is he, between the point of departure and the destination?)

Corvo wears the death’s-head mask, but it’s Campbell whose face freezes into a rictus of sadistic glee as he pours poison into the cup; and for a moment the walls fade away and he hangs thus suspended in the Void.

The Overseers speak of cleansing, but they can’t even keep the rats out of their own sanctum. By the time they find Campbell’s body, little is left of him but tattered scraps of bloody flesh, and gnawed-upon bones.

Corvo kills. He kills and kills and kills, and the blood sinks into the soil, flows into the river; and whatever he leaves behind the rats with their relentless teeth devour. The city is drowning in a sea of rats, their sleek bodies surging like a wave over everything in their path.

At the Hound Pits Corvo wakes to find one on his chest, its yellow teeth very close to his face. He flings it against the wall with a yell, but not before it sinks those teeth deeply into his hand. After that he spends his nights sitting on the floor with his back leaning against the side of Emily’s bed, blade in hand, indifferent to Callista’s wary gaze.

#

Ah, and—

The whale processing factories were built in Jessamine's father’s day, twenty years gone. There the butchers cut the blubber into strips and boil it for the oil, they carve off the meat and sell it for food, they hack off the whalebone and send it to be made into corsets and buggy whips and parasols, they extract the ambergris and sell it ounce by precious ounce to perfumers. But the blood they let run from the living whales: across bare concrete into gutters that cross the killing floor, and from there into open drains that lead to pipes as wide as man is tall that let out into the river.

Twenty years of blood: the ground beneath Dunwall is saturated with it. It falls from the sky as rain. The river runs with it.

#

Corvo feels the first signs at Lady Boyle's party—an itching in his throat, a cough that makes the partygoers move uneasily away from him. He stands in their midst. He has forgotten how to converse; he can barely hear their conversation over the constant roar of the Void in his ears.

He paces the length of a table heavy-laden with delicacies, and finds at the end all three ladies Boyle. They turn toward him and behind them the staircase disappears, the floor falls away: they are on an island, held in the stasis of the Void—the three identical masks, the blank eyes, the contemptuous mouth.

He calls a swarm of rats and kills all three of them, and the guards that try to stop him, and on the way out a fleeing nobleman who has only stumbled and fallen in his path.

(And all the while bodies are flung into the canal that has become a mass grave, the great weight of them pressing down, down into the blood-drenched earth—)

He slaughters his way through Dunwall Tower, and leaves blood on the floor of Jessamine’s bed chamber. He eats nothing and drinks only a little of what the Loyalists press upon him, and looks right through them at the Void, which lies very close; and tries not to look at Emily because dimly he knows to fear the expression the Void might capture on her face.

He wakes in a pit, and he coughs and coughs, and through the blood in his eyes he thinks what he sees in Daud's eyes is pity; but pity will not save either one of them.

(And what is it that the weepers with their own blood-filled that makes them wail and weep without surcease?)

He climbs the lighthouse, which is sometimes a tower of cement and steel and sometimes a tower of bone, the ribs of a leviathan so great that the curve is nearly imperceptible; and at the top he walks out upon a great keelbone; and is it the pounding waves or an infinite starless nothing into which Emily—

falls—

#

#

Granville Brice should have counted himself lucky that he died far from home, half-starved and with three arrows in his back, that he never penetrated more than twenty miles from the western coast of Pandyssia. For in the heart of that continent there is only a great nothing, a gnawing horror, a hole in the world—

I say to you, listen: once Pandyssia bore great shining cities, each one of which could have swallowed Dunwall whole and hardly noticed it. In them lived men who accounted two centuries only a middling lifespan and passed all their years without once setting foot on the ground, moving among towers a mile wide on floating skywalks with their heads tilted back toward the stars, which seemed not so far away.

But even those bright cities had ways for the rats to enter in, and so they did in their multitudes with their scurrying feet and beady eyes and sharp yellow teeth, bringing with them the plague—

—blood spattered on the shining walls and bodies clogging the wide stairwells, bodies encircling the base of the towers while those who survived retreated higher and higher until there was nowhere left to escape the inexorable tide of rats, climbing the stairs, climbing the walls, climbing upon the bodies piled high, consuming, devouring, gnawing a hole in the world—

—a world grown thin, sodden with blood: fragile as soaked paper—fraying, tattering—gone transparent, until that which lies beneath tears through: the Void, where nothing changes and nothing grows, an eternal ending.

One tear at a time. The rats have a long time to work. At last there will be nothing but the leviathans and the rats; and then who can say what will become of what remains?


End file.
